Centre for Scottish & Celtic Studies

The award received through the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies Seedcorn Funding was for travel to the National Library of Scotland (NLS) and the digitisation/printing of three manuscripts: NLS MS 14873, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) MS 1307, and TCD MS 1362. The majority of this digitisation was successful, and the files have allowed me, and will continue to allow me, to better understand the TCD manuscripts. This includes not only examining the texts, but also seeing other markings (i.e. colophons, marginalia, probatio pennae, signatures, and other marks) interacting in their original context.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Eoghan mac Gilleoin (Hugh Maclean) wrote four Gaelic manuscripts in Kintyre, Argyll. They contain prose, poetry, metrical vocabularies, proverbs, single stanzas, and various marginalia, and the earliest extant version of some of the texts are contained in these manuscripts. My research examines the contents of the manuscripts in conjunction with the lives of the scribe and his two Clan Campbell patrons: Colin Campbell of the Kilberry Campbells and Rev. Lachlan Campbell, minister of the first charge in Campbelltown. It considers the men’s motivations, interests, and social networks within the context of the pan-Gaelic literary culture and production. Such analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the production of Gaelic manuscripts in Kintyre and Argyll in the late seventeenth century, as well as adding nuance and depth to our understanding of the relationship between these branches of the Clan Campbell and Gaelic culture more widely, on both sides of the north channel, in the decades before and after 1700.

 

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First published: 3 May 2021